The Little President Who Cried Winning: The Reflecting Pool Lies and Those Who Believe Them

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

That Trump is the most prolific liar in human history is undisputed. It is, in fact, #ScienceFact. Why every reporter doesn’t respond to everything Trump says, every Cabinet member, every department spokesperson, every Republican member of Congress with, “What proof do you have because you lie constantly,” I’ll never know. One reason liars keep lying is because they are never held accountable for their lies. The public humiliation that Trump got when Kristen Welker asked him about proof for his Big Lie on Meet the Press recently, resulting in him storming off.

When the boy cried wolf, he quickly lost credibility. Presumably that was the lesson, but that wasn’t the lesson the Liar-in-Chief took from it. Trump learned that easily verifiable lies lost you credibility, but those that are buried in an avalanche of information, caught up in a tornado of chaos, or are just about a small facet of a very complex process are accepted.

Without lying, what does Trump have? His inchoate, incompetent, incomprehensible self! With Trump, it’s smoke and mirrors or it’s nothing. And, like with most cons, he ropes his marks in by using their own greed against them. Everyone of his collaborators is hoping to make off with whatever payout they value most and a good hunk of taxpayer money, right Lil’ Marco?

The Reflecting Pool Saga

The Trump Reflecting Pool Debacle is not only the perfect metaphor for his entire shambolic administration, but it is also the perfect illustration for his approach to lying and public policy, so let’s do a quick walk through the events as they happened. Pinch your nose closed and put on your galoshes, readers, because we’re tiptoing through the algae!

We started in April 2026 when Trump announced plans to alleviate America’s biggest worry: renovating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool! Like a bolt from the blue, Donald “Jenius” Trump wowed us again by doing the thing we wanted most BEFORE we even knew we wanted it. As soon as he announced it a grateful nation said, I’m so glad he’s cleaning it up for his birthday! Why don’t we give him a ten million dollar tip, while we’re at it. He deserves it. He’s earned it. Anywho, he also said it would take two weeks and cost maybe two million dollars.

The American flag blue was announced on 23 April.

And like the quick and efficient builder he is, on 27 April, the work began with Trump braying on social media that it would take about a week. The country braced itself for the calamity that anything Trump does going to plan foretells.

On 8 May, Trump runs the pool down like it was a common pedestrian. The entire motorcade drives around in it for a spectacular photo op. What could possibly go wrong? He also announced that it would now cost thirteen million — I guess he took our threat of a taxpayer funded gratuity seriously.

Trump compares the length of the reflecting pool to the height of skyscrapers using a cheap Perot-like poster, causing the entire country to scratch our collective ass and wonder why our collective fingers stunk. That was on 3 June.

On 4 June, the pool is filled with “clean beautiful water” from the Tidal Pool like it had been done for quite a while.

Costs had risen to $14.6 million by 12 June. The grift is insatiable.

By 16 June the water had turned noticably green. Trump’s neighbor, campaign contributor, and comic book villain, JJ Cafaro, is given $1.7 million to take the green away with his aptly named, Green Water Solutions, company. They make the problem worse.

By 20 June Trump had started singing the refrain that “vandals” had caused all of the problems with the pool. Eventually the story would balloon into a two hundred, three hundred, no, three hundred fifty foot slit cut in the bottom of the very “tough rubber” bottom that would last fifty or more years. And six innocent curious citizens have been arrested and charged for destroying government property and these ones won’t even be pardoned or eligible for the slush fund pay out, either.

So there we are, folks. There’s the entire sordid tale of compounding lies about the failures to clean up the reflecting pool in time for Trump’s birthday.

Most people don’t believe these ridiculous lies — in fact The Dispatch just published a lengthy fact check about them — but Trump’s approval rating remains in the mid thirty percent range at best. Why hasn’t MAGA given the Chronic Liar the boy who cried wolf treatment?

Illusory Explanation Keeps Them on the Hook

Ye Olde Blogger has extensively covered the machinations of cognitive dissonance in maintaining thoroughly debunked beliefs, so we needn’t do so again. However, Trump is using another cognitive sleight-of-hand trick to string the gullible along, illusory explanation.

An illusory explanation is an explanation that sounds satisfying and complete but upon closer examination proves to be inadequate. They are designed to get the listener to shut up and quit questioning the event. In this case, “Oh, vandals did the damage. We’ll ask them about it, then.” Or, “They’ve charged people with vandalizing the reflecting pool? They must have evidence that will hold up in court. It must be right.” But, as The Dispatch reports none of the police documents around the the arrests or citations mentions any type of vandalism much less the specific events Trump cites like cutting the line or dumping chemicals of any kind into the pool.

Like all sleight-of-hand tricks, the con artists only needs to distract the eye and confuse the mind long enough for the next trick to take up the viewer’s attention. By the time the grand jury convenes and declines to indict, the story will have been replaced by a lifetime of other outrageous lies. We become numb to the outrageousness of the lies, our anger at having been lied to, and ability to match details of what is happening to now to antecedents.

But, for right now, all Trump wants is for MAGA and only MAGA to nod their heads sagely and say, “Darn liberal vandals! This is why we can’t have nice things.”

Maintaining the Lie

With Fox News, the other rightwing media outlets, and an army of online trolls, bots, and useful idiots to echo Trump’s lies, it becomes difficult to disprove the claims. Even though there are hundreds if not thousands of people passing by the reflecting pool, dozens of experts in various aspects of maintaining pools, and lots of reporters from more credible outlets all giving information to the contrary, it won’t matter. The initial lie has a thin veneer of believability. That lie is echoed and amplified by the rightwing media and on social media. And contradictory evidence is too difficult to access even if it only means tuning in to CNN or NBC.

If the little boy who cried wolf had had a half dozen people between him and the villagers all saying that there had been a wolf but the boy had heroically and at great risk to himself chased it away, he probably would’ve been believed.

The greater failing here is the MSM and pundits who don’t realize that all of Trump’s lies are meant almost exclusively for MAGA consumption. He need only keep stringing them along to maintain his delusional of perfection and that he will be able to stay in power indefinitely.

Trump has no substance; he only has lies. He lies and bullies. Apparently, it works with MAGA, some media organizations and law firms, and the Republican Party, but it doesn’t work when the disproving information is juxtaposed with the lie as in gas prices.

As all of the good con artist movies do, evidence is manufactured when the mark begins disbelieving. Human beings, after all, evolved to believe our senses, so to get someone to believe something, you show them. It is convincing. So now, the Trump admin has commanded the National Park Service to release grainy footage of some poor soul kneeling next to the reflecting pool doing something that involves putting their hand in it while several other people stand around watching them. Of course the camera is too far away to provide details and too grainy to really see anything, but it certainly provides all the evidence anyone predisposed to believing the lies needs to continue believing the lies.

We see this across the board with the Trump administration, the Republican Party, and conservative media. All they have is deception. They have no real policies. They have no accomplishments. They simply tell their marks whatever they want to hear to take their money. Apparently, the only people left to believe a fabulist like Trump are those who want to be fooled like MAGA, legacy media reporters, and pundits. Those who for their own reasons need to believe that a wolf really had been there.

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